"Yes, child, all those creatures are alive like us, there is nothing else. But God is everywhere!"
Little Wienke had fixed her eyes on the ground and held her breath; she looked as if she were gazing into an abyss terrified. Perhaps it only seemed so; her father looked at her long; he bent down and looked into her little face, but no feeling of her imprisoned soul was visible in it. He lifted her in his arms and stuck her benumbed hands into one of his thick woolen gloves: "there, my little Wienke," and the child probably did not hear the tone of intense tenderness in his words—"there, warm yourself close to me! You are our child after all, our only one. You love us——" The man's voice broke, but the little girl pressed her head tenderly into his rough beard.
Thus they went home full of peace.
After the New Year, trouble once more entered into the house; the dikegrave was seized with a marsh fever; it went hard with him too, and when, under Elke's nursing and care, he recovered, he scarcely seemed to be the same man. The languor of his body also lay upon his mind, and Elke was worried to see how easily content he was at all times. Nevertheless towards the end of March he was moved to mount his white horse and ride out again for the first time along the top of his dike. It was on an afternoon and the sun, which had been shining earlier in the day, had long since been concealed by the haze.
A few times during the winter there had been high tides but they had done no serious damage; only over on the other bank a herd of sheep on an islet had been drowned and a bit of the foreland had been washed away; here on this side and in the new koog no harm worth mentioning had been done. But in the previous night a stronger gale had raged and now the dikegrave himself had to ride out and inspect everything with his own eyes. He had already ridden all along the new dike, beginning below at the southeast corner, and everything was in good condition, but as he came towards the northeast corner where the new dike ran up to the old one, the former was indeed uninjured, but where before the water-course had reached the old one and flowed along beside it, he saw that a great strip of the grass-line had been destroyed and washed away, and a hollow had been eaten in the body of the dike by the tide, which moreover, had thus laid bare a whole maze of mouse-passages. Hauke dismounted and inspected the damage from nearby: the destructive mouse-passages seemed unmistakably to continue on beyond where they could be seen.
He was seriously frightened; all this should have been thought of and prevented at the time the new dike was built; as it had been overlooked then it must be taken care of now! The cattle were not yet out on the fens, the grass was unusually backward; in whatever direction he glanced it all looked bleak and empty. He mounted his horse and rode back and forth along the bank: the tide was low and he did not fail to perceive that the current from outside had bored a new bed for itself in the mud and had come from the northwest against the old dike: the new one however, as far as it was involved, had been able to withstand the onslaught of the waves owing to its gentler profile.
A new mountain of annoyance and work rose before the dikegrave's mental vision: not only would the old dike have to be strengthened here but its profile would also have to be approximated to the new one; above all, the water-course, from which danger now threatened again, would have to be diverted by new dams or brush hedges. Once more he rode along the new dike to the extreme northwest corner and then back again, his eyes fixed on the newly channeled bed of the water-course, which was plainly to be seen at his side in the bared mud. The white horse fretted to go on, and snorted and pawed the ground, but Hauke held him back; he wanted to ride slowly and he wanted also to master the inner disquietude which was fermenting and seething within him with ever-increasing strength.
If a storm should come bringing with it high tides—such a one as in 1655, when men and property were swallowed up uncounted—if it should come again as it had already come several times!—a hot shudder trickled over the rider—the old dike, it could never stand the violent attack that would be made on it! What, what could be done then? There would be one way, and one way only, to save perhaps the old koog, and the property and life in it. Hauke felt his heart stand still, his usually strong head whirl; he did not speak it aloud, but within him it was spoken clearly enough: your koog, the Hauke-Haien-Koog, would have to be sacrificed and the new dike broken through.
Already he saw in imagination the rushing flood breaking in and covering grass and clover with its salt seething froth. His spur gashed into the white horse's flank, and with a cry it flew forward along the dike and down the path that led to the dikegrave's mound.